Those are facts I live by, yet I love, absolutely adore music, and music is something that throws the theory of what I just said out the window.  Music is made of two things essentially:  Sounds and Lyrics.  More than that, music, for the most part, lacks intent.  Sure, feelings are involved but these usually come from experiences, events from the past that have already run their course and can no longer have intent.  Sure, songs can have intent, they can speak of future plans, paths currently travelled and the like, but that is rare, because it’s hard to stick to a path once everyone knows your on it.  That’s why they are paths, because they are small, narrow and winding, meant for only one or two people at a time, get a crowd with you and your just one of the group, not your own person.  

Also, a lot of lyrics are written by ones other than the person singing it.  They are not based on personal experience or feelings, or at least not their own.  They may be beautiful but are not theirs and are not true.  Even if the words are written by the one singing them, they may not reflect the feelings of the singer, but rather words the singer wanted to write, or words that flowed when strung together.  People write songs about love who may have never been in love, people brag about how great they are that seem more like a convincing then a self-assurance.  

What what is music without lyrics?  I love both parts of it equally.  Beautiful words are spoken and amazing melodies are played and they come together as incredible moments of perfection.  These are things that people throw themselves into, knowing full well that they possibly or probably may be ridiculed or fail, and have to fall back down to earth.  These thoughts being in my head leave me to believe that the “musical” part of music is what’s true.  It’s where the true feelings lie, where the true meanings lie.  Lyrics are just the decoration, the attempt to translate what is being said into a most digestible form.  

I know that people use music to make money and get famous.  But there are people out there, real people, who use music to express themselves, and I believe in those people, I believe in their “god,” and believe that they are truly good people who create “real” and give it to us to beautiful forms.  Why do I believe in them, because they, while saying words, scream intent.  

Music recommendation for the day?  Muse’s “Glorious” It’s from their latest “Black Holes and Revelations” as a bonus track, but I think the only reason it’s only a bonus track is because of the length, one more stanza and you’ve got yourself quite an amazing song.  And that’s saying something because it’s a pretty amazing song as is.  I love songs that build up from something small to something big, and this one of those songs.  The pre-chorus is the best part with the steadily building beat getting stronger and stronger.  Highly recommended.

The post title is from Andrew Bird’s “Armchairs” 

P.S.  I was planning on using this to talk about Jason Mraz’s new “We Sing We Dance We Steal Things” but It got away from me, tomorrow I guess I’ll handle that.

There are many ways to come to this climatic feeling in a song, but I’ll focus on just one for today.  There are some things in the world that are more easily translated into beauty than others.  When something that is difficult to “explain beautifully” is explained beautifully, it make for this feeling, especially in music.  This is why love is a major launching board for great songs.  You may disagree and say “love is one of the things most easily made beautiful,” but that’s not what I’m getting at.  It’s easy to make love beautiful, It’s not so easy to explain love properly, or rather, explain the love that your feeling, but when you get those two things:  The type of love that you are feeling explained properly, and the feeling explained with beauty, you get one hell of a love song, and it’s a thing of amazement  

Another thing that is hard to “explain beautifully” is science, for science is meant to remove the cloak of beauty and show what is truly there.  So turning the destroyer into what it is in fact destroying is no easy task, and rarely done well.  Impossible, however, it is not, and I present to you this case:  Jason Mraz’s “Bella Luna.”  The song (about the moon, based on a poem about the moon he asked a friend to write) is a really sweet, beautiful song, but here’s the thing.  It’s almost scientific.  Some lines from it “A chosen child of the golden sun.” means that the moon does create light of it’s own, it just reflects light off of the sun.  Another line is “You are an illuminating anchor, to leagues of infinite number, crashing waves and breaking thunder.” meaning of course that the moon’s gravity controls the tides.  

I love stuff like that.  It’s so correct, so perfectly in sync with how things really are, and yet it’s beautiful at the same time.      

Anyway, today’s music recommendation:  ”Stop This Train” by John Mayer, nothing like a song about getting older, for those getting older.  

The post title comes form “Sweetwater Texas” by Fastball.  

The laptop also acts as the gateway to the ITouch.  Music, for the most part, doesn’t just get thrown onto Luke, it has to earn it’s way.  As I hear it more and more on party shuffle I form an opinion, always making sure I never form an opinion immediately about any song, ever.  That’s not fair to it.  What if I’m not in a good mood when I first hear it?  or worse- What if I’m not in the mood for that type of music when I hear it?  Is my whole opinion of one song going to be based on just one listen?  I hope/think not!  Every song, every made, by anyone, is a piece of their mind and heart, and deserves at least a few listens.  Of course, their are always exceptions to even the greatest of rules, and this is no different.  If it’s a “trusted artist”  (Muse, John Mayer, Jason Mraz, The Killers, Andrew Bird, Aqualung… there’s more) than it goes right on, any new stuff, without even a first listen.  They’ve earned it in my book.  

The ITouch, of course, is the portable source of music, and when I’m using it in the car, or while working, or where ever, I only want the best of the best, to keep me going strong (suck on that! coffee and red bull and thoughts of sex I’m supposed to have every seven seconds, but are rarely realized) Of course if I’m in a mood, or playing Call of Duty 4, I only want to hear the best of the best as well.  That’s where the IPod dock comes in.  It’s louder than the laptop at top speaker volume, so I can really blast things when I want to.  

This is all fine and dandy, except for one problem:  Recently I had a major ITouch malfunction.  It did that annoying thing MP3 players do when they only play out of one side of the headphones, until you wiggle the headphones in the jack, at first it’s very slight and only every so often, and the slightest jiggle will do, but as time goes on it gets more and more annoying, and you have to jiggle more and more (and now spinning is involved) until you just want to throw the MP3 player and call it a day.  I took said IPod to the Apple store and the wonderful people there and after my quiet, yet hand gesture animated explanation, plus the addition of the fact that I “don’t do any of those stupid MP3 player things like leave the headphones in the jack while it’s in my pocket” they took a look at it and just handed me a new one.  This is not the first time I’ve had an apple issue, yet every time I do, I get wonderful customer service.  (They always leave me smiling and satisfied)

New IPod!!!! Yay!!! Not.  Here’s the thing, as I am very controlling about my IPod (which is weird because that is not at all my nature, I’m very easy going) I always manually controllled what songs and videos were on it, instead of using the sync feature.  That sucked, because I lost all my “notes” things and the like.  More than that, I don’t have a complied back up list of what was actually on it, so now I’m waiting for songs to play on random that aren’t even there.  Now begins the process, the long drawn out process of finding CD’s, putting them on the IPOD, then using this to get the cover art, then copy pasting all the lyrics. Then I have to triple check that I have all the songs I want (I won’t each time, trust me) then the weeks upon weeks of suddenly realizing songs I should have on the thing, I don’t have then I want to hear the song right then, but can’t because it’s not on Luke, then waiting to get home and forgetting to put it on Luke, then realizing when I’m once again not at home.  Grr.  That’s all I can say on that. Grr.  

Music recommendation of the day:  “Bones” by The Killers  

The post title comes from The Killers song “This River is Wild”  (I’ve a theme going today, No?)

The first time, I was waiting for some people to come work on my grandmothers house and while listening to one song, began humming a instrumental from the Lost soundtrack by Michael Giacchino, called “Win One For The Reaper” it’s this really really sad, but incredibly simple and beautiful piano piece that plays in season one whenever something touching happens.  Anyway, I’m tapping my fingers and what not and then finish and go to see if the person who I’m waiting for has arrived yet and low and behold, the next song in random shuffle is “Win One For The Reaper.”  That is out of seven hundred and blah blah songs (I can’t remember the exact amount and am not reaching over the three feet to find out).

Today, I’m at work after hours when the store is closed and am putting together a product.  A few weeks back my Itouch started doing this weird thing where it only played out of both headphones/car stereo sides if I fiddled with the headphone jack.  I’ve had this happen with MP3 players before, it’s not fun.  I don’t break any of the rules, i.e. keeping the headphones in the jack when I stick it in my pocket and whatnot, so I don’t know where this problem came from.  Fortunately the product came from Apple, who, in my opinion, has the most amazing big company customer service standards out of any corporation.  At the apple store they replaced my Itouch, no charge.  The only problem was, due to the way I put songs on the old Itouch, alot of songs were missing.  I’ve slowly been fixing that problem, most recently by adding Jason Mraz’s A-Z release.  

Back to the story, (the main one) I was working and thinking of the last track on the CD, on of my personal favorites “Song For A Friend” and how I haven’t heard it in a while.  Zap!  Luke reads my brain, and the next song is low and behold, “Song For A Friend” by a one Mr. Jason Mraz.  I’m slightly freaked out, for I really would rather not have my itouch possessed.  Last thing I need is some priest sacrificing himself then throwing himself down a flight of stairs to his death for the sake of a piece of electronic equipment.  

But wait! there’s more!  The reason that I was thinking of the song right before it played was because the song I was listening to at that moment was “Tranquilize” by The Killers of their CD “Sawdust” which I’m assuming is just them catching the current hot trend of throwing unreleased material, B-sides and remixes on to a CD (see. Maroon 5′s “B-Sides”) anyway the song has a children chorus in it and it reminded me of the Mraz song, for it too has a children chorus in it.  This leads me wonder if the “random” option on Ipod’s are not so random, but thought out with code and imprints and the like.  I will however admit that the song before the instrumental mentioned before was a Metallica song, so maybe not.  

Song recommendation for this post:  Remember “Fastball?”  They had that song “The Way” a few years back, well their most recent CD has a most fun, excellent song called “Till I Get It Right.”  I’d check it out.  

The  post title comes from John Mayer’s unreleased song “Why Did You Mess With Forever.”  

Famous songs are the songs that most everyone knows, and even if they’ve forgotten, can remember by hearing the slightest clip of it.  Obviously not famous songs are the opposite.  Where am i going with this?  Well you’ll see, just be patient.  I was in the mall the other day and the local farm team for a professional MLB team was holding tryouts for anthem singers.  Our mall is like a misshapen t-square, the auditions were right in the large center courtyard of a middle, so any where you were in the mall, you can here the auditions.  These auditions were set up like American Idol, with three judges, a stage, and a group of people waiting.  

Here’s where the famous song thing comes in.  They are usually the only songs used for contests.  If your trying to motivate the crowd, your going to use a song people know and can get into, also using a song that is well known doesn’t make it look like your hiding your errors behind the fact that the judges may not no the correct way to sing the song, therefore they wouldn’t know that your singing it wrong.  Anyway… all the contestants were singing either God Bless America or the more popular choice, Star Spangled Banner.  Now the key to winning a competition with a famous song is all about identifying the “power lines.”  There are, in every famous song, lines that are key to the song, you sing them well, your golden, if you don’t, your bronze.  To sing them correctly involves belting them out.  I mean really really giving everything you got into those few lines, the power statement, added to the crescendo that comes with it, can really put you over the edge.  In the Star Spangled Banner, for example, the key line is “And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air…”  Pretty much the entire performance of that song comes down to how well you do those two lines.  Don’t believe me?  Listen really closely to a performance of the national anthem next time you watch a sporting event.  

So now that I’ve established that, I’m getting to the whole point of this entry:  Jason Mraz.  (I know who saw that coming?)  He does a cover of the song “Rocket Man.”  A song that falls under the category of “Famous Songs”  there are two versions.  One is a bonus track on itunes of him doing the song acoustically.  It’s pretty good.  The other is  some recording, in some cafe or bar at sometime when some guy clearly had a recorder at his table, you can hear the audience, glasses clinking and at some point you hear some guy say “See that one?  The blonde, That’s her birthday”  I don’t know where this came from, and I don’t know how old this is, But It really impresses me.  I’ll tell you why.  

The “Power Line” in Rocket Man is “All of this science I don’t understand, It’s just my job five days a week.”  It’s the most important line of the song, and while handled well on the itunes version, the recorded version is amazing.  You can hear him throw every bit of soul into that one line that he possibly has in him.  It’s a sound to hear I tell you.  It leads me to believe that the recording is from before he really hit it big.  I have a theory that you, not through anything you can control, lose an innocence when you become famous.  This is especially true of recording artists, earlier not studio stuff has a sense of desperation in their voice that can’t be copied when you have a comfortable, famous life.  Not that you stop trying, its just that you shed it for something greater.  But that’s just the world though my ears.  

Big surprise here:  My song recommendation for the week  Jason Mraz, Rocket Man (this isn’t the version I speak of (you’ll have to do the completely wrong thing that I am not telling anyone to do of looking on limewire to find that)

The Post Title comes from the David Ford Song “Requiem”

On the subject of folk, I’m now going to talk about the only folk I have on my Ipod, Andrew Bird. Wow. I mean this guy is just wow. I suggest him to all, for he is a joy to listen to. I have this thing with music, see, that I very rarely get into music very quickly, even if I know the artist already. There is only two artists/groups this isn’t true of: Andrew Bird and Muse (more on them later, I’m sure, especially with their new CD/DVD combo HAARP coming out). If I must comment on it, I found him by visting one of my favorite sites: Albinoblacksheep.com. Someone made a flash video with his song “Skin, Is” as the basis of the video. Loving the song I did some investigation, picking a random song that interested me. This happened to be called 11:11 (I liked the name) and soon loved that too. That was it, I found myself buying every little piece of music (of his) I could be my hands on. Still to this day, I am a big fan, especially with his new EP “Soldier On” coming out. This leads me to a rant about Itunes, but I won’t get into that.

I was in the shower and started coming up with a song, here is the chorus I came up with, probably I’ll try to come up with something more.

Why is the night sky exploding in fire in part of the world,
While the night is exploding with laughter in the rest of the world.
Why do you want me to hate the man next to me?
Why should I hate him because he prays differently?
It’s a work in progress, my apologies.

That’s all,
Adam.